There
are at present two documentary sources on information about the GRU agent
“Ales.”First, Venona 1822, Vadim
[Anatoly Gorsky] KGB Washington to KGB Moscow, 30 March 1945, that became
public in 1996 when the National Security Agency (NSA) released a set of the
deciphered Venona messages.Second,
Alexander Vassiliev’s handwritten notes and quoted text of a cipher telegram
from Anatoly Gorsky, 5 March 1945, entered into the record in the 2002 British
legal case of Alexander Vassiliev and Frank Cass & Co Ltd.[1]We will look at them in turn.

Addendum to our telegram
no.28 as a result of a conversation of “Pya” with Ales, it turns out:

1. Ales has been continuously
working with the neighbors since 1935.

2. For a few years now he has
been the director of a small group of probationers of the neighbors, for the
most part drawn from his relatives.

3. The group and Ales himself
are working on obtaining only military information, materials about “the Bank”
– the neighbors allegedly are not very interested and he doesn’t pass it
regularly.

4. In recent years, Ales has
been working with Pol repeat Pol who also meets with other members of the group
on occasion.

5. Recently Ales and his
whole group were awarded Soviet medals.

6. After the Yalta
conference, back in Moscow, one very high-ranking Soviet worker allegedly had
contact with Ales (Ales implied that it was Comrade Vyshinsky) and at the
request of the military neighbors he conveyed to him their thanks, etc.

Vadim

Who was Ales?

The
NSA/FBI annotation of Venona 1822 said that “Ales” was “probably Alger
Hiss.”If “Ales”were not Hiss, then identifying him would
be a significant historical achievement because it would reveal a hitherto
unknown Soviet source high up in the U.S. State Department. If “Ales” was Hiss
it adds an interesting and significant codicil to the Hiss-Chambers case.The evidence at his trials and that which
has appeared subsequently firmly establishes Hiss's espionage on behalf of the
Soviet Union in the 1930s.More
contested was whether Hiss's spying continued.Some Americans cooperated with Soviet espionage until disillusioned by
the Purge trials and the Terror; one example being Whittaker Chambers.Others dropped out after the Nazi-Soviet
Pact in the fall of 1939.Much of
Venona 1822’s historical significance stems from its 1945 date, since it
indicates that if Hiss was “Ales” he continued to spy through the Yalta
meetings.

But,
was the NSA right when it concluded that “Ales” was probably Alger Hiss?Although most scholars and journalists
accepted that assertion after the Venona documents were made public, a small
but vocal group of Hiss defenders has continued to challenge the
identification.Last spring they
garnered considerable publicity at a university-sponsored conference and this
fall The American Scholar, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society,
published a lengthy expose claiming to have unearthed the real “Ales.”

The
first effort to save Alger Hiss from the obvious conclusions of Venona 1822
came from John Lowenthal, one of Hiss’s lawyers.Lowenthal argued that grammatical ambiguities in the original NSA
translation of Venona 1822 could be read to mean that Vyshinsky, but not
Ales, went from Yalta to Moscow while “Ales” returned directly to the
United States. He then asserted this vindicated Hiss who had, after all, gone
to Moscow after Yalta.Already substantially
discredited by Eduard Mark in 2003, this tortured reading did not survive John
Schindler’s publication of the original Russian text in a paper given at this
conference in 2005, that demonstrated that the original Russian text
unambiguously stated that “Ales” had gone to Moscow from Yalta.[3]The bulk of the American delegation at Yalta
did not stop by Moscow but left for the U.S. via the Middle East.A contingent from the American embassy in
Moscow returned to Moscow, but stayed there and did not go on to the U.S.Only a small party led by Secretary of State
Edward Stettinius went from Yalta to Moscow (to finish a few details of the
conference) and then traveled on to the U.S. by March.Aside from support staff (and “Ales” was not
plausibly someone in that category), the Stettinius party had only four DOS
personnel who could possibly have been Ales: Edward Stettinius himself (U.S.
Secretary of State), H. Freeman Matthews (senior diplomat and advisor on
European affairs), Alger Hiss (senior official and advisor on plans for
founding the United Nations), and Wilder Foote (a journalist brought into DOS
as Stettinius’s speech writer and press aide).[4]

The Characteristic of “Ales” in Venona 1822

Compared to Foote, Stettinius, Matthew, and Hiss

Venona
1822, the 30 March cable, makes six observations about the characteristics of
“Ales” that can be compared to the attributes of the four candidates.

Item 1

Item
1. “Ales has been continuously working with the neighbors since 1935.” (“Neighbors,”
KGB terminology for the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence.)

Foote
and item 1.In the 1930s, indeed until
1941, Wilder Foote lived in Vermont editing and publishing local
newspapers.There is no evidence
whatsoever that GRU (“neighbors” was KGB terminology for the GRU, Soviet
Military Intelligence) had any operations in rural Vermont in the 1930s.Nor is there even a plausible target for
Soviet military intelligence in the state at that time. That GRU would recruit
an American source and send him to the intelligence desert of Vermont or keep
him there from 1935 to 1941 simply defies plausibility.[5]Nor is there any evidence of Foote having
any contact with GRU in the 1930s (or anytime for that matter).

Stettinius
and item 1.In the 1930s Edward
Stettinius was a vice-president of General Motors, briefly a National Recovery
Administration official working on unemployment problems, and then a senior
administrator of U.S. Steel.GRU
conducted significant industrial espionage in the 1930s, and theoretically
Stettinius would have been a person of interest to them, but there is not an
iota of evidence of any contact between the successful businessman-capitalist
Stettinius and GRU.

Matthews
and item 1.Freeman Matthews spend most
of the 1930s abroad on a variety of diplomatic assignments and theoretically
could have been of GRU interest, but there is no evidence of any contact
between GRU and Matthews.

Hiss
and item 1.Whittaker Chambers
testified in 1948 that Hiss entered the CPUSA underground in Washington in
1934, and that J. Peters, chief of the CPUSA covert arm, eager to connect some
of the well-placed members of his apparatus with Soviet intelligence in early
1936when Chambers and Hiss became part
of a GRU-linked espionage apparatus.[6]Chambers said that Hiss delivered DOS
material to him, either copied by Hiss or originals that were photographed,
until the Spring of 1938 when Chambers dropped out of Soviet intelligence.In support of his testimony, Chambers produced
summaries of sensitive State Department documents from 1938 in Alger Hiss’s own
handwriting or typed on the Hiss family typewriter as well as microfilm of DOS
documents with Hiss’s office stamp and handwritten initials on them.Hede Massing, a former GRU agent who had
transferred to KGB, also testified that she knew Hiss as a GRU source in 1936.
The two most thorough books on the Hiss-Chambers case, Allen Weinstein’s Perjury
and Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, pile up the evidence supporting
the veracity of Chambers’ and Massings’ accounts.A well-documented article by the Hungarian historian Maria
Schmidt discusses material in Hungarian Communist security service archives
that corroborates Massing’s testimony about Hiss in which Hiss is identified by
name as a GRU intelligence source by Noel Field, a former State Department
official and secret Communist who defected to Communist Hungary.[7]

Evaluation
of item 1.There is convincing evidence
linking Hiss to GRU in the mid-1930s.There is no evidence linking Wilder Foote, Edward Stettinius, or Freeman
Matthews to GRU in the 1930s.

Item 2

Item
2.“ For a few years now he has been
the director of a small group of probationers[8] of the
neighbors, for the most part drawn from his relatives.”

Foote
and item 2.There is no evidence
linking any of Wilder Foote’s family to Soviet espionage.

Stettinius
and item 2.There is no evidence
linking any of Edward Stettinius’ family to Soviet espionage.

Matthews
and item 2.There is no evidence
linking any of Freeman Matthews’ family to Soviet espionage.

Hiss
and item 2.According to Chambers,
Priscilla Hiss, Alger’s wife, typed many of the documents her husband stole
from the State Department.In 1948
Chambers produced typed and handwritten material he had hidden in 1938 from his
final months before he dropped out of Soviet espionage. The material summarized
sixty-eight different State Department documents that went through Hiss's
office.Technical examination, by both
prosecution and defense experts, established that most of the material was
typed on the Hiss family typewriter of the mid-1930s.Indeed, one of the typed document specialists hired by the Hiss
defense went further than the prosecution, advising that on the basis of the
strong and weak hits of the typing pattern, the documents had been typed by
Priscilla and not Alger.[9]

Chambers
said of Hiss’s brother: “Donald Hiss never at any time procured any documents.
Nevertheless, he was a member of the apparatus which I headed.”[10]Donald Hiss transferred to the State
Department from the Department of Labor in November 1937, shortly before
Chambers dropped out of Soviet espionage, and remained there until the end of
WWII.When Chambers met with Assistant
Secretary of State Adolf Berle in September 1939 and identified several dozen
persons as active in the Communist party’s covert operations in Washington and
implied possible espionage links, he included Donald and Priscilla along with
Alger Hiss in the list.

Evaluation
of item 2.There is evidence that
Hiss’s relations (wife and brother), assisted his espionage but none for Foote,
Matthews, or Stettinius.

Item 3

Item
3.“The group and Ales himself are
working on obtaining only military information, materials about “the Bank” –
the neighbors allegedly are not very interested and he doesn’t pass it
regularly.”

When
the GRU dominated Soviet foreign intelligence operations in the 1920s and
1930s, its networks sought political and strategic information as well as more
narrowly defined military intelligence.But as the KGB established its supremacy in foreign intelligence in the
late 1930s, the GRU’s jurisdiction was steadily narrowed. It had to get its agents
to produce more strictly military information clearly within its jurisdiction
or risk losing them to the KGB

Foote
and item 3.While Foote worked for the
DOS (cover name “Bank”) as Stettinius’s press assistant, there is no evidence
of his having any special interest in military information.

Matthews
and item 3.There is no evidence that
Matthews had any special interest in military matters in his various diplomatic
assignments.

Stettinius
and item 3.While Stettinius was Under
Secretary and then Secretary of State, there is no evidence of his having any
special interest in military information.

Hiss
and item 3.Just six months after
Venona 1822 was sent, Alger Hiss made an extraordinary proposal that the State
Department create a new “special assistant for military affairs” linked to his
Office of Special Political Affairs that handled U.N related matters.Moreover, when security officers belatedly
began to look closely at Hiss in 1946 they discovered that he had used his
authority to obtain top secret reports “on atomic energy . . . and other
matters relating to military intelligence” that were outside the scope of his
Office of Special Political Affairs.[11]Evaluation of item 3.There is evidence that Hiss tried to extend
his jurisdiction in DOS to include more than routine work-related access to
military information.There is no
evidence that Wilder Foote, Freeman Matthews or Edward Stettinius attempted any
similar unusual access.

Item 4

Item
4. “In recent years, Ales has been working with Pol repeat Pol who also meets
with other members of the group on occasion.”

“Pol”
is a Cyrillic Russian variant for spelling the name “Paul” and Whittaker
Chambers Chambers in his memoir Witness wrote that “Paul” was the cover
name for Maxim Lieber.Lieber, a
literary agent, was a semi-secret member of the CPUSA and carried out various
tasks for Chambers’ GRU-linked espionage network and had had contact with the Hiss
family.After Chambers’ defection, GRU
sent Lieber to hunt for Chambers and and pick up the pieces of Chambers’
network.When the Hiss-Chambers case
emerged in 1948, Lieber refused to discuss his activities with FBI agents and
invoked the Fifth Amendment in order to decline to answer questions about his
relationship to Chambers and Alger Hiss when called before a U.S. grand jury in
1948.The files of Hiss’s legal defense
team demonstrate that at the time of Hiss trial, a Communist party contact met
with Lieber and conveyed a message to Hiss’s lawyers that Lieber “does know
Hiss but does not propose to admit it.”[12]In 1950, the House Committee on Un-American
Activities subjected Lieber to hostile examination in which he once again
invoked the Fifth Amendment regarding Alger Hiss documents that tied him to
Whittaker Chambers; and in 1951 Lieber hastily fled to Mexico.With legal pressure on Soviet espionage
increasing in the U.S., in 1954 he moved to Communist ruled, Poland.He did not return to the United States
until 1968.[13]

Foote
and item 4.The is no evidence linking
“Pol”/Lieber to Wilder Foote.

Stettinius
and item 4.The is no evidence linking
“Pol”/Lieber to Eduard Stettinius.

Matthews
and item 4.The is no evidence linking
“Pol”/Lieber to Freeman Matthews.

Hiss
and item 4.Whittaker Chambers links
“Pol”/Lieber to Alger Hiss.

Item 5

Item
5.“Recently Ales and his whole group
were awarded Soviet medals.”

Foote
and item 5.There is nothing linking
Foote to awarding of Soviet medals.

Matthews
and item 5.There is nothing linking
Matthews to awarding of Soviet medals.

Stettinius
and item 5.There is nothing linking
Stettinius to awarding of Soviet medals.

Hiss
and item 5.In the 1997 edition of Perjury
Allen Weinstein quoted a KGB document relevant to this issue, an April 1945
memo from Pavel Fitin, head of KGB’s foreign intelligence, to Vsevolod
Merkulov, head of the KGB.Fitin noted
that one of the KGB’s American sources, the U.S. Treasury Department official
Harold Glasser (cover name “Ruble”),had worked for Soviet intelligence since May 1937, at various time for
the KGB and on other occasions for GRU and that “the group of agents of the
‘military’ neighbors whose member “Ruble” had been earlier, was recently
decorated with USSR orders.About this
fact, “Ruble” learned from his friend Ales, who is the leader of the mentioned
group.”[14]

This
information that Ales’s GRU group had been decorated matches up with the
deciphered Venona cable about “Ales”but does not in itself link “Ales” to Hiss via Glasser/“Ruble”.This link, however, was provided by
Elizabeth Bentley in 1945.In her
lengthy deposition to the FBI in November 1945 Bentley discussed the membership
of one of the KGB-linked espionage networks, the Perlo group, to which she was
courier.In her description of its
membership she had this to say of Glasser:

Referring again to Harold
Glasser, I recall that after his return from his assignment in Europe, probably
in Italy, for the United States Treasury Department, Victor Perlo told me that
Glasser had asked him if he would be able to get back in with the Perlo
group.I asked Perlo how Glasser
happened to leave the group and he explained that Glasser and one or two others
had been taken sometime before by some American in some governmental agency in
Washington, and that this unidentified American turned Glasser and the others
over to some Russian.Perlo declared he
did not know the identity of this American, and said that Charley Kramer, so
far as he knew, was the only person who had this information.Sometime later I was talking with Kramer in
New York City, and brought up this matter to him.At this time Kramer told me that the person who had originally
taken Glasser away from Perlo’s group was named Hiss and that he was in the
U.S. State Department.[15]

Bentley’s statement that Glasser had been on loan to a espionage
network headed by Hiss at the State Department fits with Fitin’s memo that
“Ruble”/Glasser had been working with Ales’s GRU group and the latter had been
decorated It, thus, links Hiss to item 5.

While
less conclusive than Bentley’s evidence, at article published in the Russian
military journal, Red Star, in 2006 by Vladimir Lota is also
suggestive.Lota discusses the
successes of the Soviet military intelligence station in Washington during
World War II.Asserting that many of
its agents have still not been identified, he not only did not provide any real
names, he also changed their cover names and avoided any explicit identifying
information.The articles focuses on
the success of a GRU apparatus that Lota calls “Omega” whose chief source was
“Doctor,” someone with access to high-level information about American foreign
policy.So successful was Omega, says
Lota, that in February 1945, “Doctor” and four other members of the Omega group
received Soviet decorations.Given the
information in the Venona 1822 (March 1945) that “Ales” and his GRU group
recently received decorations and the April 1945 KGB memo in The Haunted
Wood that “Ales” and his group had recently received decorations, there is
reason to think that “Ales” and “Doctor” most likely the same person.Moreover, Also relevant here is that Lota
writes that “Doctor” had been a 1930s’ GRU source with whom contact had been
“reestablished” in mid-1941.After
Chambers defected in the spring of 1938, Hiss and other GRU sources linked to
Chambers were deactivated for a time, “put on ice” in Soviet intelligence
jargon.Not only does Hiss look like a
likely candidate for “Doctor” in the Lota article, Wilder Foote is not a
plausible candidate for “Doctor.”Foote
had spent all of the 1930s, 1940, and most of 1941 in Vermont managing several
small newspapers.He did not arrive in
Washington until November 1941 to take a job as a mid-level information officer
in the Office of Emergency Management, an industrial mobilization agency.Since“Doctor” had been in Washington and providing high level strategic
information to GRU by August, 1941, that eliminates Foote as a candidate for
the role.[16]

Evaluation
of item 5.There is evidence linking
Hiss to having received Soviet decorations but none linking Foote, Matthews, or
Stettinius.

Item 6

Item
6.“After the Yalta conference, back in
Moscow, one very high-ranking Soviet worker allegedly had contact with Ales
(Ales implied that it was Comrade Vyshinskii) and at the request of the
military neighbors he conveyed to him their thanks, etc.”

In-as-much
as all four candidates traveled from Yalta to Moscow and all attended events at
which Vyshinskii and other high ranking Soviet officials were present, this
item provides no basis for focusing on any of the candidates in particular.

A Summary: Venona 1822: Who was Ales?

Of
the six characteristic of “Ales” provided in Venona 1822, one (item 6) provide
no basis for differentiating the four candidates.But with the remaining five items, there is no positive evidence
linking Foote, Matthews, or Stettinius to any of Ales’s characteristics.Hiss, however, is linked by positive
evidence to items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.The case for Hiss and “Ales” in Venona 1822 was and is a convincing
one.

Anatoly
Gorsky’s 5 March 1945 Cable

Venona
1822, however, was not the last word on “Ales.”Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev quoted from several KGB
documents that referred to the GRU agent “Ales” in the 1997 edition of Perjury
and in The Haunted Wood (1999).In both books “Ales” was identified as Alger Hiss.Just as they had refused to accept “Ales” as
Hiss in Venona 1822, Hiss defenders refused to accept the identification of
“Ales” as Hiss in these books, justifying their refusal on the grounds that
they mistrusted Vassiliev, who had had access to KGB archival material, and
they could not review the underlying material from which Weinstein and
Vassiliev quoted.

After Lowenthal’s tortured reading of Venona
1822 was discredited, Hiss defenders were left with no positive evidence
vindicating Hiss, only their negative refusal to accept the evidence
implicating Hiss.They then turned to
Alexander Vassiliev’s notes on the text of a ciphered cable sent by Anatoly
Gorsky on 5 March 1945.Given their
strident doubts of Vassiliev’s reliability at the time of the publication of The
Haunted Wood this is somewhat surprising, but consistency has never been a
characteristic of Hiss defenders.Vassiliev’s notes on the cable became public during his 2002 legal
action in the United Kingdom against the journal Intelligence and National
Security for publishing attacks on his character made by John
Lowenthal.Very little attention was
given to these notes until 2006 when David Lowenthal, brother of the by then
deceased John Lowenthal, provided a photocopy of Vassiliev’s notes (handwritten
in Russian) on the 5 March cable to interested researchers.On the basis of this photocopy, in June 2007
Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya published a article “The Mystery of Ales”
asserting that the cable proved that “Ales” was not Hiss and identifying Wilder
Foote as the likely candidate for the GRU spy “Ales.”[17]

Their
argument was deeply flawed.Additionally, the text of the 5 March cable used by Bird and
Chervonnaya was itself flawed.Vassiliev’s notes on the cable begin on one page of a notebook and
continue onto the next page.The
photocopy provided by David Lowenthal to researchers cut off the top line on
the second page.We have no reason to
think that this was other than an innocent, albeit careless, error by whoever
made the copy.And it is not clear if
the error was made by Alexander Vassiliev when he supplied a copy as part of
the evidence in his suit or if the error was made when a subsequent copy was
made for David Lowethal after the court case ended.But that there might be some garble with the text of the 5 March
cable was clear from the time it was first made available because there was a
grammatical disconnect between the text on the bottom of the first page of
Vassiliev’s notes and what appeared to be the top line on the second page.

There
was a simple solution to that problem: obtain a better photocopy.We did so, and the missing line
appeared.And the missing line seriously
undercuts Bird and Chervonnaya’s argument.While we obtained the complete text, Bird and Chervonnaya did not.They first made their analysis of the 4
March 1945 cable public at a conference held at New York University on 5 April
2007.We were not present but quickly
obtained a recording of its proceedings and realized at once that they were
using the incomplete text.[18]We made the complete text available on the
web on 10 April and provided all researcher who asked with photocopies of the
complete original so they could confirm what had happened.[19]It was then surprising that when Bird and
Chervonnaya published their paper on the web in June and in the summer issue of
The American Scholarthey continued to use the incomplete text.[20]

Let
us turn first, however, to the actual (and complete) text of Vassiliev’s notes
on a cipher telegram from Vadim [Anatoly Gorsky] to Moscow Center, 5 March
1945.The text that is missing from the
Bird and Chervonnaya version is emphasized and in italic:

He [Gorsky] wants to be included in the Sov. delegation
to the conference in San Francisco.However, he can’t leave his post to any of his collaborators.He wants to leave it to “Son” (F.A. Garanin,
transferred from Cuba to Washington as an attaché of the Soviet embassy).After the conference, Vadim wants to come to
Moscow to give a personal report.

Particular attention – to “Ales.”He was at the Yalta Conference, then went to
Mexico City and hasn’t returned yet.Our only key to him – “Ruble.”“Ruble” is going on assignment himself (Italy). èit is difficult to oversee “Ales”through him.

“We spoke with ‘Ruble’ several times about ‘Ales’.As we have written already, ‘Ruble’ gives
‘Ales’ an exceptionally good political reference as a member of the
Comparty.‘Ruble’ reports that ‘Ales’
is strong and strong-willed, with a firm and decisive nature, completely aware that
he is Communist in an illegal position, with all the ensuing consequences.Unfortunately, it seems that, like all local
Communists, he has his own ideas about secrecy.As we already reported to you, ‘Ales’and ‘Ruble’ used to
work in ‘Karl’s’ informational group,which was affiliated with
the neighbors.When the connection with
‘Karl’ was lost, ‘Ruble’ backed out, while ‘Ales’ entered into a connection
with ‘Pol’.He told ‘Ruble’ about this
himself a year and a half ago, when he asked the latter to meet with ‘Pol’ in
order to continue work.”

“Ruble” could talk to
“Ales”about recommencing work.If the latter doesn’t want to work with
“Ruble,” he could do it with us.

There is an unclear situation:“About 6 months
ago, ‘Ales’ told ‘Ruble’ that he had met a Russian (he didn’t give his name),
who immediately asked him to write a brief report about a certain matter.‘Ales’ asked ‘Ruble’s’ opinion as to what he
should do.‘Ruble’ evaded the question,
saying that ‘Ales’ could do as he saw fit.

‘Ales’ should be
approached by a Soviet representative.Either an employee of Center, or ‘Sergey,” or me, ‘Vadim’.The most convenient place - at the
conference in San Francisco.

“After 2 or 3 meetings,
depending on how ‘Ales’ conducts himself, we can get down to business, alluding
either to the password, or to ‘Ruble’, or simply to ‘Ales’s’ progressive
attitudes."

Bird and Chervonnaya focus on only one part of the
cable.The cable noted that “Ales” had
been at Yalta, went briefly to Moscow, and from their went to Mexico City.Stettinius, Hiss, Matthews, and Foote were
all at Yalta, went briefly to Moscow, and then traveled on Mexico City for an
inter-American conference of foreign ministers, known as the Chapultepec
Conference (21 February - 8 March 1945).But, and this is the key to Bird and Chervonnaya, Matthews and Hiss had
returned early and were in Washington on 5 March.Because Gorsky wrote that “Ales” was still in Mexico City, Bird
and Chervonnaya insist that Alger Hiss could not possibly be “Ales.”

The logic of the Bird and Chervonnaya argument made
Foote and Stettinius, the two remaining in Mexico City on 5 March, equally
possible candidates for “Ales,” but the likelihood that no one would take
seriously an argument at the American Secretary of State was a long time Soviet
agent, led them to quietly put Stettinius aside, although the evidence in both
cases was equally strong (i.e., equally weak).Since the logic of Hiss defenders is that someone, anyone, other than
Hiss must be “Ales,” Wilder Foote was thrown under the truck to save Hiss.Actually, Vassiliev’s notes on the 5 March
cable, increased the evidence that “Ales” was Hiss.

Let us first consider the central point of the Bird
and Chervonnaya argument.It is the
case that Hiss had been with Stettinius at Mexico City but returned to
Washington early, as did Matthews as well.While on the surface this tends to exculpate Hiss, it is weak
evidence.What the statement says is
that Anatoly Gorsky thought Hiss was still in Mexico City as part
of the American delegation.Looking at
the totality of the evidence, the most sensible conclusion is that Gorsky
simply did not know that Hiss had returned early.

As Eduard Mark has pointed out, relevant here is an
earlier cable from KGB headquarters in Moscow (Venona 195 Moscow to New York
KGB).Bird and Chervonnaya ignore this
message.On Saturday, March 3rd,
the KGB New York station received a cable signed by the chief of foreign
intelligence, General Fitin, an urgent order for the KGB’s chief illegal
officer, Iskhak Akhmerov (“Albert”):

At the forthcoming meeting with Albert, pass on to him on
our behalf the following task.

Jointly with Robert, take all
requisite steps to obtain in good time and pass on to us information about the
composition of the delegation to the forthcoming conference which is in Babylon
[five groups unrecovered] what tactics the delegation intends to adopt, whom it
is counting on for support, what blocs have been prepared already and formed,
how far there will be a united line for the representatives of the Anglo-Saxon
world and so on.As the information
comes in pass on to the Center by telegraph without delay.

Babylon was the standard KGB cover name for San Francisco, so the
upcoming U.N. conference was the subject.Akhmerov was an “illegal” officer, meaning he and the agents he
supervised were not part of a Soviet diplomatic office such as the embassy in
Washington or the consulates in New York and San Francisco.They operated under false identities and had
no diplomatic protection if apprehended.

KGB
headquarters in Moscow did not directly communicate directly with illegal
officers, thus the direction in the cable that the order was to be passed to
“Albert”/Akhmerov at a “forthcoming meeting.”The 3 March cable went to the “legal” KGB station at the Soviet
consulate in New York.From there a
covert courier would have delivered it to Akhmerov at a regularly scheduled
meeting where messages were passed between the “legal” station and Akhmerov’s
“illegal” station.Akhmerov was then
working under the cover of a fashionable women’s clothing and fur shop in
Baltimore.And it is possible that the
cable would have been forwarded first to the KGB station at the Soviet embassy
in Washington and then by covert courier to near-by Baltimore.In any event, it would be a few days at
least, perhaps a week or more, for the cable to have reached Akhmerov by covert
courier.And here is where Gorsky’s 5
March cable comes in.

Anatoly
Gorsky was chief of the “legal” station where he and other KGB officers had
diplomatic status and held cover posts at the Soviet embassy or other
authorized Soviet government agencies.Gorsky, for example, was a senior secretary at the Washington
embassy.In the 1930s and into the
early 1940s the chief KGB station in the U.S. had been at the New York
consulate.But with American entrance
into World War II and Washington’s growing importance as the center of U.S.
decision making, KGB gradually shifted its assets from its station at the New
York consulate to one operating out of the Washington embassy.Gorsky was chief of the station in
Washington and overall supervisor of U.S. KGB operations (including Akhmerov’s
illegal station), and was often shuttling back and forth between Washington and
New York.His 5 March (Monday) cable to
Moscow appears to have been a quick response to Moscow’s Saturday order,
showing that the U.S. station was on top of the matter and had active leads to
follow on the UN question, namely the GRU’s agent “Ales.”Hiss’s Office of Special Political Affairs
was supervising preparations for the UN conference, so he was in a perfect
position to satisfy Moscow’s tasking.But, given Akhmerov’s illegal status, not only would it have taken some
days for Moscow’s urgent message to reach him , but there also would have been
an equally long delay in a response via covert couriers.Given the urgency Moscow had attached to the
matter, Gorsky’s 5 March response was simply a quick acknowledgement and
demonstration that his station’s attention to the urgent request.

Gorsky
told Moscow that he couldn’t follow up immediately because “Ales” was still in
Mexico City, where Stettinius and his chief aides were meeting with Latin
American foreign ministers.As Bird and
Chervonnaya stated, Hiss had already returned from Mexico City.And it is true that Gorsky could have
known that Hiss had returned.Hiss had spoken on a public affairs radio program and two newspaper
stories on the program mentioned him, although in neither case was he given
headline treatment, there being more prominent diplomats than he speaking on
the program.[21]But that Gorsky could have known
is simply to state a possibility and is not the same as his actually
knowing.Hiss was not at this
time a prominent figure.He was not
Secretary of State, Under Secretary of State, or even one of the several
Assistant Secretaries of State, he was not an ambassador nor did he even hold
ambassadorial rank.He was a senior DOS
official at the third or fourth level of the hierarchy and as yet little known
to the press or public.Not until he
presided over the opening sessions of the United Nations founding conference in
San Francisco a few months later did he make an impression on the national
media.Nor, for that matter, was “Ales”
a KGB agent whom the KGB would have reason to track.He was a GRU source that KGB was aware of simply because one of
its agents, Glasser/“Ruble,” had worked with “Ales.”But, aside from “Ruble’s” association with “Ales,” Gorsky and KGB
had had no contact, regular or otherwise, with “Ales.”

For
Gorsky to assume that Hiss was still in Mexico City would have been an easy
mistake to make.Hiss had been in
Mexico City as a senior aide to Secretary of State Stettinius, Stettinius was
still in Mexico City (that was well-covered in the press), ergo, Hiss was still
there.We do not know precisely when
Gorsky saw Fitin’s 3 March cable (Venona 195) with its order that information
on the upcoming UN conference be sent to Moscow “without delay,” but the
earliest was Saturday with Sunday more likely (cables do have to be
deciphered), and then Gorsky had to compose his reply and get it ciphered and
on the way on Monday, 5 March.Bird and
Chervonnaya attribute an all-knowing efficiency to Gorsky that simply didn’t
exist in the real world of a U.S. KGB station chief in wartime balancing the
time demands of his cover job as a senior embassy diplomat with his other job
directly overseeing the Washington KGB station and supervising the KGB stations
in New York and San Francisco as well as the illegal station headed by Iskhak
Akhmerov.

And,
in any case, the 5 March cable has more to say of “Ales” than the single item
that Gorsky thought he was still in Mexico City.And it is these other attributes of “Ales” revealed in the 5
March cable that Bird and Chervonnaya pass over with silence or minimal
attention because all of them point straight at Alger Hiss.

The
first point is that “Ales” was a GRU agent, not KGB, and at this point no KGB
officer had had direct contact with “Ales.”In the 5 March cable Anatoly Gorsky reminded Moscow:

Our only key to him [Ales] –
“Ruble.”“Ruble” is going on assignment
himself (Italy). èit is
difficult to oversee “Ales”through
him. We spoke with ‘Ruble’ several times about ‘Ales’.

“Ruble” was Harold Glasser, a senior Treasury Department official in
1945 who had secretly joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s as a young
economist and remained active in the underground Washington party organization
of federal government employees.In
1945 Elizabeth Bentley in 1945 identified Glasser as part ofthe Perlo group of secret Communists who had
provided information to the Soviets first via the CPUSA but then directly to
the KGB.Under the cover name “Ruble,”
Glasser appears in eleven deciphered Venona messages as an active Soviet source
and member of the Perlo group.

Regarding
“Ruble”/Glasser and “Ales,” Gorsky in the 5 March cable went on to state in a
passage that includes the phrase omitted from the Bird-Chervonnaya text:

As we already reported to
you, ‘Ales’ and ‘Ruble’ used to work in ‘Karl’s’ informational group,
which was affiliated with the neighbors.

“Ales” and “Ruble” are both unequivocally identified as members of
“Karl’s” GRU apparatus.“Ruble” is
known to be Harold Glasser.And “Karl”
is known to be Whittaker Chambers.In
his autobiography, Chambers noted that his cover name in the underground in the
1930s was “Carl.”(The English names
Carl and Karl are spelled identically in Russian, and under all Russian
Cyrillic to Latin English transliteration system, is transliterated as “Karl.”)Another Gorsky document also explicitly
identified “Karl” as Whittaker Chambers’ cover name.This document, just like the 5 March cable under question, was
made public in Vassiliev’s 2002 law suit and provided to researchers by David
Lowenthal.It was a December 1948 KGB
memo written by Anatoly Gorsky summarizing damage done to Soviet intelligence
operations by defectors, one of whom was Chambers:

11. 116th – Harry
Azizov, former employee of a steel-smelting company in Chicago

12. 101st – Peter
MacLean, journalist and photoreporter, not used since ‘37

13. 103rd – David
Carpenter, newspaper employee

14. 107th – Felix
Inslerman, place of employment unknown

15. 113th – Harry
Rosenthal, employee of an insurance company in Philadelphia

16. 115th – Lester
Hutm, former employee of the Frankford Arsenal

17. “Ernst” – Noel Field,
former employee of the State Dept.

18. “Rupert” – V.V.
Sveshnikov, former employee of the War Dept.

19. “Richard” – Harry White,
former assistant to Sec. of the Treasury Morgenthau, died in ‘48

20. “Aileron” – G. Silverman,
former chief of the Planning and Statistics Division of the AAF

21. “Ruble” – Harold Glasser,
former director of the Monetary Division of the Dept. of the Treasury . . .[22]

In Witness Chambers wrote that Harold Glasser
had worked for his espionage network in the mid-1930s.[23]Chambers dropped out of espionage in 1938
and, as the 5 March cable said, “the connection with ‘Karl’ was lost.”While the evidence linking Glasser/“Ruble”
to Chambers/“Karl” and Hiss/“Ales” in the mid-1930s in Washington is
considerable, Wilder Foote was in Vermont in the 1930s and had no known or even
suspected connection with Whittaker Chambers and his CPUSA/GRU espionage network
in Washington, DC.Edward Stettinius
was briefly in Washington as a NRA administrator early in FDR’s first term, but
for the period when Chambers’ apparatus was active, he had left the city for a
senior administrative post with U.S. Steel.He had had no known or suspected connection with Chambers and his
CPUSA/GRU espionage network in Washington, DC.Freeman Matthews was also largely absent from Washington during the time
when Chambers’ apparatus was active and had no known or suspected connection with
Chambers and his CPUSA/GRU espionage network in Washington.

The 5 March message noted:

“When the connection with ‘Karl’ was lost, ‘Ruble’ backed out,
while ‘Ales’ entered into a connection with ‘Pol’.”

As discussed above in connection with Venona 1822, “Pol” (or “Paul”)
was Maxim Lieber who Chambers identified as part of his network and who was
sent by GRU to find Chambers and, it would appear, pick up the pieces of
Chambers’ network.Given his refusing
to testify about his relationship with Chambers and Hiss and fleeing the U.S.
to Communist Poland, once more “Ales” is linked to Chambers’ network.

Bird
and Chervonnaya pass over these passages linking “Ales” with “Ruble” and Karl
in part because of their decision to use their incomplete text which is missing
the key phrase “and ‘Ruble’ used to work in ‘Karl’s’ informational group."It is clear, however, that Bird and
Chervonnaya realized that the 5 March cable’s references to the relationship of
“Ruble” with “Ales,” even ignoring the phrase they omit, devastated their
effort to exonerate Hiss.In
desperation they suggest that “Ruble” was not Harold Glasser but some other
mysterious unknown figure and therefore should be ignored.But not only do eleven Venona messages
identify “Ruble” as Glasser, “Ruble” is also identified as Glasser in the
December 1948 KGB memo cited above, “Failures in the USA” written by Anatoly
Gorsky.

This,
however, brings up a bizarre situation.The Bird and Chervonnaya essay is built around one key item of evidence,
Vassiliev’s hand-written notes on the 5 March Gorsky cable.But Dr. Chervonnaya in 2005 dismissed
Vassiliev’s notes, stating:

the allegedly hand-written
Russian notes currently under discussion can only be treated as a third-hand
source - of doubtful quality and authenticity - and for this reason can not be
a subject of discussion by objective professional historians.[24]

What is the difference between her 2005 impeachment of Vassiliev’s
notes as unworthy even of discussion by historians and her 2007 embrace of
Vassiliev’s notes as the key to understanding the “Ales” matter?The difference is that in 2005 she was
denouncing Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s 1948 memo that listed Alger Hiss as a
Soviet spy compromised by Chambers’ defection while in 2007 she is using
Vassiliev’s notes on Gorsky’s 1945 cable to exonerate Hiss and label Wilder
Foote as the Soviet spy “Ales.”In addition
to entirely dismissing Vassiliev’s notes, in discussing Gorsky’s 1948 memo she
has also treated Gorsky as a careless intelligence officer who used unreliable
sources for his report.In contrast, in
her discussion of Gorsky’s 5 March 1945 cable she treats him as an efficient
officer who could not possibly be mistaken about “Ales’s” whereabouts.The standard in judging reliability and
accuracy appears to be this: when Vassiliev and Gorsky report something that can
be seen as exonerating Hiss, they should be relied upon, but when Vassiliev and
Gorsky report something that implicates Hiss, then the two are unreliable.[25]But they are the same sources
in both cases.

In
his 5 March cable Gorsky also discussed the close relationship between
“Ruble”/Glasser and “Ales” and the latter’s commitment to communism:

“We spoke with ‘Ruble’ several times about ‘Ales’.As we have written already, ‘Ruble’ gives
‘Ales’ an exceptionally good political reference as a member of the
Comparty.‘Ruble’ reports that ‘Ales’
is strong and strong-willed, with a firm and decisive nature, completely aware
that he is Communist in an illegal position, with all the ensuing
consequences.”

There is no credible evidence that Wilder Foote was a
member of the Communist Party.He does
not show up in memoir literature of party veterans, in records of the party
that are accessible in archives, or as a subject of interest of various
congressional investigating committees.The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in particular gave close
scrutiny to Americans working for the United Nations in the late 1940s and
early 1950s who had party backgrounds and subpoenaed them.Most invoked the fifth amendment to avoid
testifying and Secretary General Trygve Lie either fired them, forced their
resignation, or failed to renew their contracts.Wilder Foote was a very prominent American working for the UN
(Lie’s chief press aide) and was never a subject of the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee probe because he did not havea party
background.SISS’s information was
based on FBI investigatory information made available to the committee on an
informal basis. Although FBI had interviewed a hostile U.N. colleague of
Foote’s who accused him of Communist sympathies (based largely on Foote’s good
opinion of Alger Hiss!), it is a symptom of the lack of substance to the
evidence that the bureau, in light of the overwhelmingly benign information it
had gathered on Foote, treated this evidence as too thin to be pursed and
dropped the matter.Foote was never the
object of SISS inquiry.[26]

Nor did Foote have a known relationship with Harold
Glasser.Wilder Foote did not arrive in
Washington from Vermont until November 1941.There is no evidence of Glasser and Foote having any sustained
interaction or even any interaction.Moreover, while in Washington from the early 1930s until 1940, Glasser
was on a two year Treasury assignment in Ecuador from 1940 to 1942, was back
for some months then off to North Africa in 1943, and, after another return, on
several trips back and forth to Europe in 1944 and 1945 assisting with Treasury
work with American and Allied armed forces.Even the opportunity was lacking for Glasser to develop the confidence
to give “Ales,” if he were Foote, the strong endorsement that is in the 5 March
1945 cable.

As for Matthew and Stettinius, there is no credible
evidence that either was a member of the Communist Party in party records or
congressional or FBI investigations.Nor is there any known relationship of either man with Harold Glasser.

To sum up, Venona 1822 points at Alger Hiss as the
real name behind “Ales.”Vassiliev’s
notes on Gorsky’s 5 March cable do say that “Ales” was in Mexico City when Hiss
was in Washington, but likely this was simply a matter of Gorsky being unaware
that Hiss had returned early from the Mexico City conference.Everything else in the 5 March cable,
particularly the crucial information on the relationship of “Ruble”/Glasser and
Karl/Chambers with “Ales,” points at Alger Hiss.With confidence, the view that “Ales” was Alger Hiss has been
reaffirmed.

[4]. Scholars are in debt to Eduard Mark for his
pain-staking research into the itineraries and whereabouts in February and
March of 1945 of the Americans at the Yalta conference. Mark, “Who Was
‘Venona’s ‘Ales’?”.

[5]. The question might be raised of “sleeper”
agents.GRU did have a few “sleeper”
agents, but these were professional Soviet officers, illegal operatives
sent to innocuous places to gain cover and credibility for their false
identifies.There is, for example the
GRU illegal officer who adopted the identify of Canadian Ignacy Witczak and
moved to California in 1938 and enrolledin the University of Southern California and earned a B.A. and M.A. in
political science and was admitted to a Ph.D. program. His presence was not
know to American security until GRU cipher officer Igor Gouzenko’s defection in
1944 produced evidence of his GRU links. Americans recruited as Soviet agents, however, had no need for
such long term establishment of cover and identify and were steered as quickly
as possible toward targets of Soviet intelligence interest.

[6]. Likely someone will make something of the
difference between 1935 in Venona 1822 and 1936 in Chambers’ account, but minor
discrepancies in remembered chronology (“Ales” remembering in 1945 when he
entered into a GRU connection, Chambers remembering in 1948 when he and Hiss
connected to GRU) are common, and most research historians know not to regard a
date someone remembers ten or fifteen years after the fact as precise (close,
probably, but not precise).

[13]. Testimony of Maxim Lieber, 13 June 1950, U.S.
House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding Communist
Espionage (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1951), 3599–3609.In interviews with historian Allen Weinstein
in 1975 Lieber confirmed that he had been a Communist, participated in the
underground and assisted Chambers in the work of his apparatus, knew Josef
Peters and Boris Bykov and had on their instructions attempted to locate
Chambers after his defection. Weinstein, Perjury [1997], 99,
111–14, 130–31, 138n, 280–81.After Perjury
appeared Lieber partially repudiated his statements to Weinstein.

[16]. Vladimir Lota, “Moris Makes Contact,” Krasnaya
Zvezda [Red Star], 5 May 2006.We
thank John Fox, Dan Mulvenna, and David Murphy who all played a role in
bringing this article to our attention.

[17]. Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, “The Mystery
of Ales,” American Scholar, Summer 2007,
Http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/ales-birdlong.html#31;Bird was the co-author along with Martin J.
Sherwin ofAmerican Prometheus: The
Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2005)
that won a Pulitzer prize.Dr. Chervonnaya
was in Soviet days a researcher at the Soviet Institute of USA and Canada in
Moscow and, among other duties, author of some particularly vicious
anti-American propaganda: The Boomerang of Hatred: On Racism in the USA
(Moscow, USSR: Novosti Press Agency Pub. House, 1987).She is today an independent researcher who
writes on Soviet espionage and has written and produced several television
documentaries on the subject.

[18]. We thank NYU’s Tamiment Library for quickly
supplying an audio recording of the proceedings of the conference.

[19]. John Earl Haynes, “Ales: Hiss, Foote,
Stettinius?” Johnearlhaynes.Org, 10 April 2007, Http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page63.html.The current version on the web is dated 7
June and incorporate a few minor corrections in the 10 April text.

[25]. Svetlana Chervonnaya, “Gorsky Symposium: Gorsky
Memo”;Svetlana Chervonnaya, “‘Anatoly
Gorsky’s Lessons or In Search of a Path Through ‘The Haunted Wood’,” The
Alger Hiss Story (2005), Http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/home.html; Svetlana
Chervonnaya, ed. and trans., “‘Gorsky’s List’,” The Alger Hiss Story,
October 2005, Http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/home.html; Svetlana Chervonnaya,
“The Story Behind ‘Gorsky’s List’,” The Alger Hiss Story (2005),
Http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/home.html. The motive for Gorsky, then a senior
KGB official in Moscow, for falsely identifying Hiss as a compromised agent in
an internal KGB document is not explained or why any Soviet intelligence
officer would want to exaggerate his agency’s failures to his superiors.Bearers of bad news are rarely appreciated
in any bureaucracy but were particularly disliked in Soviet ones.To be precise, when Gorsky wrote the memo in
1948 he was a senior officer of the Committee of Information (KI), a
short-lived merger of KGB with GRU.Since the missing phase with its devastating refrence to “‘Karl’s’
informational group” has now been made public, we would not be surprised that
in desperation, in addition to claiming that “Ales” was not Hiss and “Ruble”
was not Glasser, the claim will be advanced that “Karl” was not Chambers.

[26]. We wish to thank Max Holland for making
available a full copy of Wilder Foote’s FBI file (FBI file #105-14132) that he
obtained through FOIA.